


I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes

by Lalalli



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fluff, Humor, Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 17:41:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13171953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lalalli/pseuds/Lalalli
Summary: Jemma considers herself to be an excellent Secret Santa.  So she's not going to let something as insignificant as mutual animosity get in the way of finding the perfect gift for Fitz.





	I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes

**Author's Note:**

> Did I plan to post this before Christmas? Yes. Am I posting it two days late instead? Also yes. Am I overusing pointless rhetorical questions? You be the judge of that.
> 
> Even though I started this right after Thanksgiving, it turns out that those "baby" things require "care" and "attention". LAME.

Jemma considers herself to be an excellent gift-giver. She carefully tracks every time her friends complain about having lost or broken something, or if they’ve been mildly inconvenienced, or linger by a store window to look at something on display. She’s the type of person who gifts her mum the earrings she’s been eyeing since August, will get Hunter one of those alarm clocks that simulate sunlight when he has trouble waking up for his graveyard shift as a security guard at the museum, will buy Mack a Rosetta Stone set to help him learn Spanish when she notices that he has a crush on Elena.

She takes pride in giving thoughtful gifts, so when she draws Fitz’s name for their friends’ 5th annual Secret Santa gift exchange? Well, she’s not about to let something as trivial as mutual animosity get in the way of finding him the perfect Christmas present.

“You know that Secret Santa isn’t a competition, right?” Daisy asks, looking over Jemma’s shoulder at the spreadsheet she’s created on her laptop. “It’s not something you can actually win.”

“Not with that attitude, you can’t.” Jemma turns to give Daisy a pointed look as she snaps her laptop shut. “And stop snooping - it’s supposed to be a secret.”

Daisy rolls her eyes. “Please. I already know who has my name and what they bought for me.”

“Who?”

Daisy raises an eyebrow. “I can’t tell you. It’s supposed to be a secret.”

*

Fitz is, admittedly, the person in Jemma’s friend group who, on paper, Jemma has the most in common with. They’re both transplants from the UK, both child prodigies, both work in the sciences, and both have doctorates in their respective fields. They share a group of friends, they see each other at least once a week, and have each others’ phone numbers saved in their contacts.

But they got into a heated argument the first time they met each other and they’re both stubborn and unwilling to let go of their bad first impressions, so they’re very deliberately Not Friends. Every time they go out to dinner or drinks with their friends, they spend the first fifteen minutes pretending to ignore each other until they inevitably get drawn into an argument, at which point they’ll spend the rest of the night bickering and trading insults.

And because Jemma has spent so much time with Fitz, she has been able to pick up a few things about him:

He thinks that The Hulk is an actually useful member of The Avengers (which is wrong, because what’s the point of having a superpower if you can’t even control it?)  
He thinks that monkeys are acceptable lab assistants (also wrong, for many, many reasons that are impossible to enumerate)  
He thinks PopTarts are an acceptable breakfast food (which, again, is wrong because not only are they a disaster nutritionally, they’re not even pleasing to the palate. What’s the point of eating something bad for you if it tastes like actual cardboard sandwiched around melted gummy bears?)

And while those tidbits are better than nothing, it’s not really enough information to help Jemma get a super thoughtful Secret Santa gift for Fitz. Not unless she wants to get him a bunch of PopTarts for Christmas, but there’s no way Jemma’s going to condone that kind of malfeasance.

So Jemma’s just going to have to find out more about Fitz. Which is fine. She can just pay extra close attention to him for the three weeks leading up to Christmas. She could probably even have a couple conversations with him without it devolving into screaming matches. She’s a grown woman. Theoretically, she should be able to show patience and restraint. Not a problem at all.

*

The first hiccup in Jemma’s plan comes when she’s getting drinks with her friends at the Boiler Room and she realizes that Fitz doesn’t talk. At all.

Well, okay, every once in a while he’ll jump in with a joke or a quip, but the conversation tends to be led by Hunter, Daisy, and Bobbi, with Mack occasionally providing wry commentary. Elena doesn’t jump in as much, but that’s no surprise, seeing as English is her second language and it’s hard to jump in with all the rapid jokes being slung around. But even she talks more than Fitz, as Mack and Daisy are very intentional in asking her questions, pausing to listen as Elena searches for the right words to say, trying their best to make sure she doesn’t feel left out.

And Jemma knows that Fitz doesn’t feel left out, but she also doesn’t know how she’s supposed to find out anything about him if he’s not talking.

After concluding that Daisy would be the most likely to check her phone right away if she receives a text, Jemma takes out her phone and surreptitiously texts her under the table.

 **Jemma** : Ask Fitz about his day.

Daisy looks at her phone and wrinkles her nose. She shoots Jemma an unimpressed look, then looks back down at her phone.

 **Daisy** : Why don’t YOU ask Fitz about his day?

 **Jemma** : Because it’ll be suspicious if I ask him.

 **Daisy** : It’s suspicious that you’re asking me to ask him.

 **Jemma** : What if I said that it’s in the name of Christmas?

Daisy rolls her eyes. “Fitz!” Daisy says with forced cheerfulness. “How was your day?”

Fitz shrugs. “Fine. How was yours?”

Jemma frowns and grabs her phone again.

 **Jemma** : Ask him if anything interesting happened today.

 **Daisy** : Seriously?

 **Jemma** : Just do it.

 **Daisy** : YOU do it.

 **Jemma** : Please.

Daisy places her phone face down on the table and folds her arms, very purposefully watching Hunter regale their friends with yet another anecdote about his side job as an Uber driver.

 **Jemma** : Daisy. Please.

 **Jemma** : Just ask him.

 **Jemma** : It’ll be the last one, I swear.

Daisy’s phone vibrates each time Jemma sends a text, but Daisy pointedly ignores her phone and Jemma’s pleading puppy eyes. Finally, as soon as Hunter finishes his story, Jemma clears her throat and asks brightly, “Did anything interesting happen today, Fitz?”

Everyone slowly turns to stare at Jemma. Jemma frowns, feeling defensive. It’s not that weird for her to ask about another person. She asks after other people all the time.

Fitz raises his eyebrows at Jemma. “Should something interesting have happened today? You didn’t send me an envelope full of anthrax, did you?”

“Or one of those singing telegrams?” Hunter chimes in.

“Or prank call him?” Mack asks.

Jemma scowls. “What? No! Of course not!”

“Then why are you asking?” Fitz asks, suspicious.

“Because you’re the only one who hasn’t shared anything about your day yet, and usually friends tell each other these things.”

“We’re friends now?”

“We’re friends-adjacent.”

“Friends twice-removed?” Daisy suggests.

“Frienemies?” Hunter asks.

“No, that’s for enemies who pretend to like each other,” Bobbi corrects him. “Fitzsimmons are friends who pretend to hate each other.”

“Are we really still trying to make ‘Fitzsimmons’ happen?” Mack asks. “That’s still a thing?”

The conversation devolves into the relative merits and drawbacks of using portmanteaus and whether the use of ‘Fitzsimmons’ will ever truly catch on, and Jemma realizes that getting to know Fitz will require a bit more scheming and plotting than she originally planned.

*

In hindsight, Jemma probably should have seen this coming.

She really didn’t think she was being that obvious. She’s had game nights with her friends before. Granted, prior to this month, she’d never actually planned any of them, and they tended to occur twice a month instead of twice a week, so maybe that set off some alarms. And it’s possible that Bobbi and Daisy noticed that the games they played were carefully curated to find out more about Fitz.

The crazy thing, though, is that it’s been working. Playing Spontuneous helped her figure out that Fitz does not keep up with music at all and probably hasn’t listened to the radio since 1998. The night they played The Voting Game, she learned that while Fitz is messy, he’s not dirty. He might leave his jackets and shoes all over the place, might misplace his keys somewhere under his piles of unopened junk mail, but he’ll never leave dirty dishes in the sink overnight. And while she knew he loves shark movies, she learned through Hot Seat that he got drunk one night and contributed ten dollars to every shark movie on Kickstarter, and that his biggest regret is that he didn’t contribute the entire lump sum to one individual movie to receive the best perks.

She also learned that Fitz is sharp and snarky and funny and kind of cute, which, okay, she already knew, but it’s easier to appreciate those qualities through the lens of figuring out what gift to buy him as opposed to figuring out how to win an argument.

But while using game nights as a way to get close to Fitz was a very successful strategy, it also gave their friends the impression that Jemma, well, wants to get close to Fitz. Romantically. Which is probably why it’s Friday night and she and Fitz are alone in her apartment, half an hour past when they were supposed to start game night.

“Mack just texted that he and Elena got last minute tickets to the theatre.” Fitz puts down his phone and reaches for another slice of pizza.

Jemma sighs. “And Bobbi just texted that she and Hunter got food poisoning. Which means that even if Daisy comes, we still don’t have enough people for Never Have I Ever. The box says we need four people.”

Fitz rolls his eyes. “You do realize that not only do we not need four people for Never Have I Ever, but we also do not need the box itself, or the cards inside. People have been playing Never Have I Ever for ages without having to buy it.”

“But it’s more fun this way,” Jemma insists. “It was on Ellen.”

Fitz opens his mouth to respond, but then both of their phones go off at once. He glances at his phone. “I guess Daisy’s bailing out too.”

“And we definitely can’t play Never Have I Ever with two people.” Jemma watches as Fitz’s eyes dart indecisively around her flat - looking for a graceful way to exit, probably. She presses her lips tightly together, racking her brain for two-person games, trying to think of a way to convince Fitz to stay.

“Do you want to just watch a movie instead?” Fitz asks.

Jemma grins at him, relieved. “That sounds great. Did you have anything in mind?”

“I heard A Sharkmas Prince is supposed to be really entertaining.”

Jemma brightens. “I’ve been dying to watch that! I was trying to convince Bobbi and Daisy to watch it with me, but they said they’ve been reading all over Twitter about what a train wreck it is.”

“I read that too, and it just made me want to watch it more.”

Fitz gets the movie set up while Jemma gets them beers because she wants to play along with the drinking game rules she saw on Sharkfeed.

By the time the movie ends, they are truly, properly, plastered, which results in Jemma convincing Fitz to sleep on the couch instead of trying to go home in his condition. The next morning, they nurse their hangovers together with copious amounts of coffee and bacon, and decide to watch a few more of Netflix’s Sharkmas movie offerings to get themselves further into the holiday spirit.

And when Fitz leaves late that afternoon, Jemma knows that it’s unreasonable to want him to stay. They already spent almost 24 hours together, just the two of them. Just because they watched a bunch of cheesy holiday movies together, doesn’t mean they’re suddenly best friends.

Although they do start texting each other constantly.

 **Fitz** : Just took down the mistletoe in the elevator at work. It might work for A Sharkmas Kiss 2, but in this political climate? That’s the last thing we need. #Metoo

 **Jemma** : I just saw that it’s going to stay in the 50s for the rest of the week. Which, if there’s no snow, then that means there’s no snowball fights, which means that romance is dead. Turns out our Sharkmas Inheritance is global warming.

 **Fitz** : Hey, remember when we were playing Hot Seat and Daisy said that Gary Oldman was the oldest celebrity you find attractive?

 **Jemma** : No

 **Jemma** : But go on

 **Fitz** : I noticed that Sharkest Hour has been getting good reviews, but no one wants to see it with me.

 **Fitz** : Do you maybe want to see it?

 **Fitz** : Since I like WW2 movies and you have a huge Gary Oldman boner

 **Jemma** : Hey! I resemble that remark.

*

Daisy outright cackles when she finds out that Jemma and Fitz are going to the movies together. “I knew it!”

Jemma doesn’t look up at her, too focused on browsing through Amazon. “You knew that we would be able to tolerate each other if we set our minds to it?

“I think that going on a date is a bit more than tolerating each other.”

Jemma snorts. “It’s definitely not a date. It’s two people who want to see the same movie who are seeing it together out of lack of other options.”

And it’s not a date. For one thing, it’s hardly dinner and a movie - they go to a matinee at 1:30 pm on a Sunday afternoon to save on ticket prices. There’s none of the first date nerves, none of the concern over looking nice or whether her palms are too sweaty to hold his hand, no wondering if they’ll ever do this again. Instead, it’s dressing comfortably in leggings and trainers and friendly bickering and nudging his ribs with her elbow and going out to coffee afterwards so they can continue arguing over whether Gary Oldman or John Lithgow did a better job playing Winston Churchill.

So maybe Daisy is right in that they don’t only tolerate each other. It’s possible that they might actually be friends.

*

Jemma has to admit, she was disappointed when she first realized that she wouldn’t be able to make it home for Christmas. She has Christmas Day off, but then she has to go back to work on the 26th, and she didn’t have enough vacation days or funds to make the long trip to England worth it.

But Fitz, Hunter, and Elena were in similar situations, with their families so far away in other countries, and Mack’s brother was spending the holidays with his girlfriend’s family, and Bobbi’s parents were going on a couples’ cruise, and Daisy’s estranged from her parents, so all of her friends ended up staying in town. So even though, in previous years, their friend group exchanged Secret Santa gifts the week before Christmas, it just made sense to push it back a week so that they could all celebrate the holiday together.

And it’s fun, with everyone contributing their own traditions to the festivities. Bobbi and Daisy decorate their apartment with so many twinkle lights and tinsel and paper snowflakes that it looks downright gaudy. They blast Christmas pop music, skipping past Baby, It’s Cold Outside to avoid another Fitzsimmons fight about whether it’s too rapey or whether it’s an empowering song about disregarding societal expectations of female sexuality. They gather around the table for an over-the-top breakfast, and once they’ve cleared the table and washed the dishes and set out the full array of hot drinks, they sit around the tree to open gifts.

Everyone usually waits until all the gifts have been opened to reveal their Secret Santa identities, but to Jemma’s surprise, Fitz figures it out right away.

When Fitz pulls his present out of the gift bag, his eyes light up, crinkling in the corners as he breaks out into a wide grin, delighted. “It’s City Sharkers!” He looks up at Jemma, and it’s a lot to take in, honestly. He’s cute enough when he’s scowling - it’s hard to keep her heart from flipping over in her chest when he’s smiling like that, his face bright and open. “Thanks, Simmons!”

Jemma’s mouth goes dry. He sounds so sure that it was her, for all that it could’ve been anyone.

Hunter reaches across him, pulling another sheet of tissue paper from the gift bag. “Looks like there’s something else in there.”

Fitz reaches in and furrows his brow in confusion. “Half a cowboy hat?”

Jemma bites back her smile. “It was bitten by the actual Norfinn.”

Fitz’s jaw drops. “The baby shark in the movie? There’s no way. How did you get this?”

“I donated in your name to the sequel’s Kickstarter. Which, by the way, you should open the envelope attached.”

Fitz quickly tears open the envelope and unfolds the sheet of paper inside to read the confirmation page that Jemma printed out from her computer. He’s quiet for a long moment. “This can’t be real. It says that I also get a walk-on role in City Sharkers 2: The Legend of Curly’s Shark.” Fitz looks up at Jemma, staring at her unblinkingly. “You’re joking. This can’t be real. Simmons...I can’t...you don’t…” He lurches forward, throwing his arms around Simmons in a tight hug.

Simmons laughs, patting his back. “I’m glad you like it.”

Fitz pulls away from her, studying the paper again, his expression full of wonder. “This is the best Christmas ever. I love you,” he says, easy as anything.

Jemma’s breath hitches. Fitz freezes, his eyes widening as he processes what he said.

“All.” he adds belatedly. “I love you all. All of you.”

Jemma keeps her expression carefully neutral, ignoring everyone’s knowing looks. Hunter smirks. “We all love you too, mate.”

Fitz swallows and taps his fingers rapidly against his thigh. He waits a few awkward moments before announcing, “I’m going to get more eggnog.” He pushes himself to his feet and carefully sidesteps the piles of crumpled wrapping paper, loose ribbons, and empty boxes on his way to the kitchen.

Jemma scrambles to her feet. “Me too.”

“You don’t like eggnog,” Bobbi reminds her as she follows Fitz to the kitchen.

“I’m developing a taste for it,” Jemma calls back over her shoulder. When she gets to the kitchen, Fitz is rummaging through the cupboards. “The eggnog is in the refrigerator,” she reminds him.

“I know. I’m looking for the bourbon. I’m making mine extra strong.”

Jemma opens the pantry and reaches behind the boxes of cereal to pull out the bourbon. She turns towards Fitz, holding it out to him. “How’d you know I was your Secret Santa?”

Fitz takes the bottle from Jemma without looking at her. “You were going out of your way to spend a lot of time with me. The only possible explanations were either you had a crush on me or you were my Secret Santa.” He turns to pour the bourbon into his glass. “One of those was likelier than the other. It wasn’t hard to figure out.”

Jemma bites the corner of her mouth. “They’re not exactly mutually exclusive, you know.”

Fitz places the bottle down on the counter and turns to look at her. “What?”

Jemma shrugs. Her heart is beating rapidly in her chest with nerves, but it’s easy to push forward. She knows it’s going to turn out well. It’s hard to misinterpret what just happened. “Having a crush on you and being your Secret Santa. Just because the latter was true, doesn’t rule out the former. It can be both.”

Fitz swallows heavily. “Is it?” Fitz asks, his voice hoarse.

Jemma takes a step towards him and leans up to give him a soft kiss. Fitz immediately brings his hands up to frame her face, increasing the pressure of his lips on hers, warm and affectionate and perfect.

He pulls away, but stays close enough to lean his forehead against hers. “If you kissed me because there’s mistletoe above our heads, I’m going to fucking cry.”

Jemma laughs. “I don’t think there is. But even if there were, A Mistletoe Sharkmas taught us that kissing under the mistletoe just leads to epiphanies about our true feelings. So we’d end up dating either way.”

“Good.” Fitz leans in to kiss her again. “That’s exactly what I want.”

 


End file.
